1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, a printing apparatus control method, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional printing apparatus discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-333878 uses a fixing device to fix a toner on a sheet in executing printing. A conventional printing apparatus like this executes preheating, which is heating processing executed before printing, by previously applying a heat to the fixing device.
If a print instruction is input from a personal computer (PC) to a conventional printing apparatus like this, a time required from the start of the instructed printing until a first sheet to be printed is printed can be reduced by starting heating of the fixing device even if an image to be printed has not been ready yet (i.e., if the image to be printed has not been stored or rasterized yet).
In recent years, a conventional printing apparatus has been used that uses a fixing device having a small thermal capacity. A fixing device of this type is referred to as an “on-demand fixing device” or a “surf-fixing device”. If a fixing device of this type is used, costs, an amount of consumed energy, and the size of the apparatus can be reduced.
However, the life of the fixing device of this type is short. Accordingly, if an image is recorded by using a fixing device having a small thermal capacity, the life of the fixing device may expire very soon if the fixing device is always preheated.
Therefore, it may be useful to restrict execution of preheating so that the fixing device is not preheated unless a print instruction is input. However, in this case, if preheating is executed too much, the life of the fixing device may be consumed very soon.